Everyone wants a slice of Ground Zero

MUSEUMS, scholars and even artists from all over the world are queuing up for a chance to obtain material salvaged from the rubble of the World Trade Centre, it was reported yesterday.

"Dozens" of inquiries - ranging from a museum in France to a sculptor in North Carolina - have already been received in connection with the growing collection of artefacts removed from the site.

It was only two weeks after the events of September 11 that New York's authorities began a search through the rubble for material that could form part of the city's own memorial.

A team of archivists has spent four months combing through the 1.5 million tons of debris from Ground Zero in search of significant salvage "to tell the story for generations to come".

Bart Voorsanger, the architect leading the project, said: "Two iconic buildings collapsing, virtually simultaneously, that alone is amazingly historic. The destructive force of that is what we've tried to capture."

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The fragments are gathered at a handful of sites around the city: New Jersey scrapyards; vacant stretches of tarmac at Kennedy Airport; and at the giant Fresh Kills landfill site on Staten Island.

The New York Post calls them "sacred relics". The collection includes the familiar - a row of twisted bicycles still chained to a rack; pages from wall-calendars - and the awesomely strange - the huge boulders of impacted material, where the scorched and fused wreckage of the building sandwiches the crushed remains of office furniture.

One of the first things to be set aside for preservation was the makeshift flagpole - actually a lamppost - on which three firemen were photographed hoisting the American flag over Ground Zero.

At Kennedy Airport, the giant girders which made up the lower facade of the north tower - the part of the building left standing after the collapse - have been set out in neat rows, shrouded in white tarpaulin.

The artefacts also include the wrecked remains of the monumental sculptures that used to stand in the public spaces around the Twin Towers. A single one of Rodin's The Three Shades has been recovered, headless and footless.

Alexander Calder's abstract Stabile now sits in four crumpled and charred fragments at a Port Authority site in Jersey City.

Fritz Koenig's great bronze globe, which stood in the central plaza and was held to symbolize a world of peaceable prosperity, has ruptured like a ping-pong ball.

Perhaps the most elegant material witness of what happened, however, is a single small shard of glass carefully preserved in the archive.

It is remarkable not for what happened to it, but for what did not happen to it. According to the curators, it is one of only a handful of pieces from the thousands of windows in the towers not to have been melted or vaporised in the impact.